The train from Gardermoen runs south through pine forest and grey rock, and for the first while you cannot quite believe you are here. I had read about the light, of course, everyone does, but reading is not the same as sitting with your forehead against the window at eight in the evening while the sun still sits a hand above the treeline. The Flytoget is quiet, mostly people with roller bags and the particular patience of travellers who have already been moving for many hours. I remember thinking that the seats were comfortable, and that no one was talking, and that this, apparently, was Norway: a whole carriage of strangers who had agreed, without discussion, that silence was fine.
I had booked a room at Citybox Oslo, which is a hotel that does almost everything through a screen and very little through a human voice, and which suited me perfectly because I was too tired to make small talk in a language I still fumble. The room costs about nine hundred kroner a night, which is roughly eighty-five dollars, and it is clean and simple and has a window that opens onto a courtyard where someone, at some point, had tried to keep a few potted herbs alive. I stood there for a while with the window open, listening to the city settle into evening, and I thought: two years. Two years of this.
The next morning I walked down to the harbour. It is not a long walk from Citybox, past the Opera House, which looks like a glacier that decided to become a building, and you can walk up onto its roof in your ordinary shoes, which seems to me the most Norwegian thing: a national landmark you are allowed to climb. The fjord was a calm grey-blue, the sky half cloud, and there were people swimming at Sørenga, right next to the city, diving off the wooden piers like it was the most normal thing in the world. At eight in the morning. In August. I stood at the edge of the water and thought about how much courage it takes to start something, and then I took off my shoes and went in.
The water is cold even in summer, about eighteen degrees, which is not a fact I looked up so much as a fact I felt in my ankles and then my knees and then, briefly, my chest. It takes the breath away, but in a good way, the way a sudden burst of wind does on a mountain. I did not stay in long, maybe two minutes, but when I came out I felt more awake than I had in weeks. I stood on the pier with the water dripping off me and watched a ferry slide past, and I thought: this is what they mean by friluftsliv, this open-air life, and it is not about hiking or skiing at all. It is about being outside in a way that includes the body completely.
Later that day I went to the Munch Museum, because it seemed like the right thing to do, and because The Scream is the kind of painting you think you know until you are standing in front of it and the sky actually does look like it is screaming back. I walked through the galleries slowly, and I was struck by how much of Munch’s work is about the light, or the lack of it, and how that must have shaped him, growing up in a country where the sun disappears for months at a time. The museum is big and quiet and you can spend hours there without noticing, and when I came out the light had changed, the evening sun slanting long and gold across the city. I paid about a hundred and sixty kroner for the ticket, which is around fifteen dollars, and I thought: that is worth it. That is a fair price for standing alone in front of a painting and feeling understood.
In the afternoon I took the tram to Grünerløkka, which is the neighbourhood everyone tells you to go to, and it is lovely, but I was there for a specific reason: the Oslo Jewish Museum, which I had read about, and which I discovered, standing in front of its closed door, had been shut for renovation since May. There was a small sign, and a date in 2028, and I stood there for a moment with my hand on the handle, feeling the particular disappointment of a door that will not open. I mention this because it is a real thing that will happen to you too, if you come, and because it is worth knowing before you make the trip. The Historical Museum in the centre has some of the Viking objects while the old Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy is also closed, the ships themselves not on display until the new museum opens next year.
That evening I had dinner at Den Glade Gris, a restaurant in the city centre that is named after a happy pig, and I ordered a bowl of fiskesuppe, fish soup, which came with cream and dill and a piece of salmon that fell apart at the touch of the spoon. It cost about two hundred and eighty kroner, which is around twenty-six dollars, and I ate it slowly, watching the light outside the window turn from gold to grey. The restaurant is warm and crowded and the staff do not rush you, and I sat there for a long time after the bowl was empty, thinking about how strange it is to be a person who has just arrived somewhere and is already beginning to feel it become familiar.
The practical things are the things that take up the first week. Registration at the police station, which in Norway is the place you go for your D-number, the temporary identification number that lets you open a bank account and get a SIM card and exist in the system. I had read about it online, but the process is slower than the internet suggests, and you stand in queues and fill out forms and wonder, at certain moments, if you have done something wrong. DNB has a branch on Karl Johan, the main street, and I went in and sat across from a woman who spoke English better than I speak Norwegian, and she explained everything with a patience I did not quite deserve. The rent for a modest one-bedroom flat in Oslo, by the way, is about fifteen thousand kroner a month, which is roughly fourteen hundred dollars, and I have already started to think about whether I can live with a roommate or a smaller place or both.
I also went to Vinmonopolet, the state-run liquor store, because in Norway you cannot buy wine or stronger beer in the supermarket, only in these particular shops. It is a strange feeling, walking into a place that looks like a library and buying a bottle of red, and it is something you adjust to, but it is also something you notice, the way the state decides these things. The supermarket, on the other hand, is ordinary, almost aggressively so, with milk at about twenty-seven kroner for a litre and bread at thirty-five or forty, and I stood in the aisle for a while just looking at the brands, all of them foreign to me, and thinking: this is where a life begins, in the small choices.
On my third evening I went down to the harbour again, past Aker Brygge, where the restaurants and the crowds and the summer energy gather, and I stopped at a café called Elias mat & sånt, which is the kind of place where you can sit outside with a coffee and watch the boats. The coffee cost fifty-five kroner, about five dollars, which is what a coffee costs here, and I sat with it for an hour, not doing anything, just watching. A group of people on a nearby pier had set up a small grill and were drinking beer, and the smell of charcoal drifted across the water, and I thought: this is what August is for. This is why people live here.
I have already started to notice the nights drawing in, just a little, a few minutes earlier each evening, and there is a word for that restlessness that comes with it, but I do not know it yet in Norwegian. The crayfish season starts in the first week of August, and the festivals are gearing up, and the city has that particular feeling of a place that knows summer will not last, and so it is trying to use every hour of light. There is a comedy festival at the SALT venues on the waterfront, and I have been told the jazz festival will take over the parks the following week, and I am starting to learn the rhythms of a place, which is different from reading about them.
One morning I walked up to the Vigeland Park, which is a park full of sculptures of the human body, hundreds of them, in every possible attitude and stage of life, and I walked among them for a long time, feeling oddly comforted by the nakedness, the sheer variety of human forms all made in stone. There is a fountain in the centre, and children were running in and out of the spray, and I sat on a bench and thought about how much this place is about the body, the physical fact of being alive in this landscape of rock and water and weather.
I am writing this from a room in a hotel that is not a home yet, but it is beginning to feel like the start of one. I have a bank account and a D-number, or at least the promise of one, and a SIM card that works, and a few directions I can find without thinking too hard. I have not seen the northern lights, of course, they do not appear in August, but I have seen the way the summer light holds on until almost eleven, and I have felt the cold of the fjord on my skin, and I have learned that a bowl of fish soup can be a kind of anchor. Hei fra Oslo, hei from a city I am just beginning to know.
Tomorrow I will take the tram to a neighbourhood I have not visited yet, and I will probably get lost, and that will be fine. That is what the first days are for, I think, being lost in a place until it stops being lost. I am glad you are here with me, or I with you, or whichever way it is that a voice travels across the distance. Take care, and I will speak to you soon.